Top Ten by Katie Cotugno
“That sounds incredible,” Gabby’s mom gushed, rounding Go and holding her hand out for her $200, which Kristina delivered with officious solemnity. “What about you, Shay? Do you have summer plans?”
“Just teaching music lessons to try and save up some money for school,” Shay said. “And then also maybe a trip to LA, if we can convince Gabby to do the photo thing.”
Gabby felt a bear trap spring shut deep inside her chest, sinking its ferocious metal teeth in. “What?” her dad asked, at the same time as her mom said, “What photo thing?”
“Oh,” Shay said, whirling to look at Gabby. Then, “Shoot. I’m sorry. I figured you’d at least mentioned it to them.”
Gabby hadn’t, in fact, explicitly to avoid a conversation exactly like this one. “It’s a photo thing at UCLA Mr. Chan told me about,” she explained, giving them the highlights. “I’m not going to go.”
“Really?” Her mom’s brow furrowed. “Why not?”
“Are you sure?” Her dad was frowning. “That sounds perfect for you, Gabby.”
“Oh, you should go!” Chelsea put in from her perch next to Ryan on the sofa, eyes wide and excited. “LA is so beautiful. My dad grew up in Santa Monica; we used to go visit my grandparents every year for Passover.”
“Yeah,” Gabby said brightly, as if the climate of California might be what was deterring her. “I’ve heard it’s great.” She picked up the dice and rolled too forcefully, trying to ignore the roomful of curious glances. She could feel her cheeks burning under their scrutiny. After all, what was she supposed to say? Of course she wanted to do the UCLA thing. Obviously she wanted to go. She’d spent the last two weeks imagining it basically nonstop: the beaches and the palm trees and the endless pink neon. The things she might learn there. The pictures she might take. Even more than actually going, though, Gabby wanted to be the kind of person who could: who could fly across the country solo, confident that she’d be able to handle whatever she found on the other side of it. Who didn’t melt down at the thought of something new.
But she wasn’t.
“Reading Railroad,” she said, eyes on the board in front of her. “I’ll buy.”
They dropped it after that, the conversation looping back around to safer waters. Gabby tried to relax. Still, everything about this night—in particular, everything about Chelsea—was annoying to her now: her cool, casual white T-shirt. The charming, interested way she asked Gabby’s mom about her work. The proprietary way she touched Ryan’s sleeve to get his attention; the story she told about the yoga class she went to every Saturday morning at the Y. “Gabby, you should come with me sometime,” she said cheerily. “I know you’ve got anxiety stuff, right? Yoga is great for that.”
For a second Gabby only gaped at her, stunned into silence. She couldn’t believe Ryan had told her that. She couldn’t believe Chelsea had just come right out and said it. “Oh, really?” she snapped, immediately grimacing at how nasty she sounded but totally unable to stop herself. “Wow, thanks. Nobody ever told me that before.”
The living room was quiet for a moment. Chelsea looked totally taken aback. Finally: “Gabby,” Shay said softly.
Crap. Crap. “I’m going to go get more nuts,” Gabby announced, standing up and making a beeline for the kitchen. She wrenched open the oven door, realizing too late that Ryan had followed her. “What are you doing?” she asked, nearly hitting him in the face with a sheet pan. Ugh, she was so annoyed that he’d come in here. It made things look weird and suspect.
Ryan didn’t seem to care. “Look, she didn’t mean anything by that,” he began, not bothering to ask what Gabby’s problem was. “Her parents are doctors, she was just trying to—”
“Oh, great,” Gabby interrupted. “Maybe I can go see them both, then. Maybe all the Rosens can just get together and cure me—”
“Can you stop?” Ryan was frowning. “What’s your deal, huh? You’ve been acting weird all night. Did you not want us to come, or what?”
“Of course I wanted you to come,” Gabby said. “Stop, I missed you like crazy. You know I missed you like crazy.”
“Okay,” Ryan said, shaking his head. “Then what—” He looked at her for a minute, like he was searching for a hole in her defense line. “Is it ’cause I brought Chelsea? Because I do actually think if you got to know her a little, you’d think—”
“I know she’s nice,” Gabby insisted. “I said she’s nice the other day.”
“Okay,” Ryan said. “So?”
Oh, Gabby did not want to be having this conversation. “Ryan,” she said, warning. “Leave it.”
“I don’t want to leave it,” he said. “I want you to talk to me.”
Gabby sighed noisily. She hated this, when she knew she was being a brat but couldn’t stop. They were too newly made up to get away with it; she didn’t have the credit, but she also couldn’t totally help herself. “Fine,” she said. “First of all, I don’t want you to think I don’t like Chelsea. I think Chelsea is great, truly.”
Ryan looked extremely skeptical. “But?”
“But,” Gabby said, shooting him an irritated glare, “I just don’t see why I have to, like, log the miles to get to know this person when you’re obviously going to be tired of her in five minutes just like you always are.”
Ryan leaned back against the counter with his arms crossed, looked at her mildly. “First of all,” he pointed out, “that’s kind of a super-shitty thing to say. Second of all, I’m not bored of her. We’ve been dating almost six months. I don’t intend to get bored of her, okay?”
Something about his expression, the smugness of it, riled her. “Okay,” Gabby said. “This is the big one? What are you guys, in love?”
Ryan raised his eyebrows.
“Really?” That took Gabby by surprise. Obviously she and Ryan hadn’t exactly been talking lately, but the idea that he’d had time to fall in love with somebody since the last time they’d had a conversation was . . . startling.
Oh, she did not like it at all.
She got that she was being a little bit of a hypocrite here, obviously—after all, she and Shay had said it, hadn’t they? But this felt different. This was Ryan. In love with someone. Something about it made her want to lift bags of sand until her muscles got big and she could scale the sides of houses like a monkey. Something about it made her want to stockpile food and hide until next year. She realized all at once that she’d thought being friends again would automatically mean she’d go back to being his unequivocal favorite person. It was unsettling to think that maybe she’d lost her seat. “Okay. I take it back, then. I’m sorry.”
Ryan shook his head. “That’s not—look, I don’t want to start this by—” He sighed. “You don’t have to be jealous, Gabs.”
Gabby almost decked him. “I don’t have to be what?” The nerve on him, seriously, to come into her house after all this time and—
“Stop.” Ryan put his hands up, palms out. “Whatever offensive thing you think I’m saying right now, that’s not what I’m saying. I just mean—you’re still my best friend. Even though we didn’t talk for five months. You were still my best friend that whole time.”
“I—” Gabby broke off, knocked back by a rush of emotion with the same intensity as panic that wasn’t panic, not exactly. She felt, horribly, like she might be about to cry. “That makes no sense,” she told him finally, not quite managing to look him in his face.
“Maybe not,” Ryan admitted. “But, like . . . when has anything about our friendship ever made any sense?”
That made her smile; she couldn’t help it. It was relief, she realized, this overwhelming breathless feeling. She was so hugely relieved to have him back. “You were still my best friend too,” she told him. “When we weren’t talking.”
Ryan looked surprised at that, even though he’d said it first. “Really?” he asked. “I was?”
“Yes!” she told him. “Of course you were. Come on.”
“Hey, kitchen people!” Sha
Gabby and Ryan made sheepish faces at each other. “No, jerks,” Gabby called back. “We’re not.”
Shay and Chelsea came into the kitchen then, looking mischievous. “Hi,” Shay said, hooking her chin over Gabby’s shoulder. “We want to go out.”
Gabby hesitated. She felt raw and bruised and suddenly exhausted, like she needed to decompress in a dark, quiet room; still, there was something about the tone of Shay’s voice that made Gabby want to give her what she wanted. You don’t have anything to be jealous about, either, she wanted to say.
“Well,” she said instead, “let’s go out.”
Ryan raised his eyebrows but he didn’t argue. “Where?”
“Someplace exciting,” Shay said, then, amending quickly: “Not that, you know, this isn’t exciting. But we want to have an adventure.”
“Colson Pool’s open,” Chelsea offered. “Well, not open, not until Memorial Day. But it’s full. I went and did my lifeguard retrain a couple of days ago.”
“You wanna swim?” Gabby asked. God, she barely wanted to go to the diner.
But Shay was grinning, electric. “I wanna swim,” she said.
Gabby looked at them for a moment. Then she looked at Ryan. “Okay,” she said slowly. “Let’s go swim.”
RYAN
The front gate to the pool complex was locked, obviously, on account of it being nighttime and also not summer yet, so they parked the car outside and scaled the fence one after another, Ryan boosting all three of the girls up before finally climbing over himself. “You’re sure there are no cameras?” Gabby asked, hugging herself a bit as they passed the shuttered admission booth. “It feels like there should be cameras for, like, this exact purpose.”
“I’ve never seen any,” Chelsea said, not sounding particularly concerned about the notion. For all her wholesome, all-American girl-jock talk, she had a rule-breaking streak that Ryan really enjoyed. “And I’ve been coming here since I was little.”
Ryan had grown up swimming here in the summers too—he’d done the town’s day camp when he was a real small kid, before his dad switched him over to hockey, and they’d had a pool membership until he was twelve. Still, he’d never been here in the dark before, and it was strange and a little disconcerting, like being at school on a weekend or the only people eating in a restaurant. The snack bar hulked like a bunker in the distance. The locker rooms looked like army barracks from some alien planet. The surface of the pool was placid and still.
Gabby and Shay dropped back as they crossed the concrete pool deck; Gabby had been quiet on the ride over, but she seemed upset again now, this time at Shay.
“You set me up, though,” Ryan could hear her saying.
“I just think you should try it,” Shay replied. Ryan purposely moved far enough away that he couldn’t make out anything else.
“Is this creepy?” he asked Chelsea as they headed for the edge of the water. “This is a little creepy, right?”
“Big tough hockey star!” Chelsea said playfully, scooping her hair up into a knot on top of her head. “What are you, scared?”
“Uh-oh,” Gabby said, laughing as she and Shay caught up. “Gauntlet-throwing.” Then, quietly enough so that only Ryan could hear her, she added, “It’s totally creepy, you’re one hundred percent right. I’m about to run all the way home.”
Ryan smiled at her. “Can’t do that,” he said, just as softly.
Shay pulled her boots off and flung herself into the pool after Chelsea, diving into the deep end graceful as a dolphin. “Everything okay?” Ryan asked, once it was just the two of them up on the pool deck.
“Oh, yeah, it’s fine,” Gabby said, waving her arm like batting away a fruit fly. “Just that summer thing, was all.”
Ryan nodded, not entirely sure what to say about it. On one hand, he thought Shay was probably right about trying to get Gabby to do something outside of her lane. And it sounded like an awesome chance. On the other, he didn’t want to risk saying that when they’d literally just made up and risk throwing them into the shit all over again. “You’ll figure it out,” he finally said.
“Yeah,” Gabby said, “I guess.”
“Hey,” Ryan said, catching her by the elbow. “I mean it. Your anxiety stuff and all that? You will.”
Gabby smiled for real then. “It doesn’t always feel like it, dude, I will tell you that much.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said quietly. “I hear that.”
The two of them stood there for a minute, quiet. Shay and Chelsea were splashing around in the pool, screeching their heads off; Ryan meant to cannonball in after them, but instead he paused and turned to Gabby in the dark. “You know that you can always count on me for stuff, right?” he asked suddenly. “I mean, even if we’re dating other people or living on opposite sides of the world or we don’t speak for five months again for some reason. Like, no matter what. I’m here.”
Gabby’s face twisted; Ryan held up his hands. “I know,” he said, before she could tease him. “Don’t be gross.”
But Gabby shook her head, shifting her weight and hugging herself a little. “That’s not what I was going to say at all, actually,” she told him. “Actually, I was going to say that I’m here too.”
“Hey, the two of you!” Chelsea called from out in the deep end, the pale skin of her arms seeming to glow as she treaded the chilly water. “We thought you were finished arguing about dumb stuff!”
“We are,” Ryan called back, feeling more sure than he had about anything all year. He reached for Gabby’s hand in the darkness, nodded across the concrete at the pool. “You ready?” he asked, and Gabby nodded. They ran across the pavement and jumped in.
NUMBER 5
THE BIG ONE
JUNIOR YEAR, WINTER
RYAN
Ryan didn’t have practice on Wednesdays, so he took the bus home after eighth period, joking around with a few of the underclassmen and screwing around on his phone. Gabby had posted a new photo on Instagram that morning, a shot of Shay in the music room at school with her head bent over her cello; Ryan scrolled past it, then went back and clicked the little heart to like, telling himself not to be such a whiny little dick.
His stop was all the way at the end of the route on the far side of Colson, and it was December-dark by the time he climbed the steps to the front of his house, pulling a stack of mail out of the box on his way inside. When he was a kid he used to really like looking at home furnishings catalogs like a weirdo; sometimes, to be honest, he still did. He flipped past the Stop & Shop circular plus a flyer for the car wash near the high school before landing on an envelope from the bank in Colson Village with THIRD NOTICE stamped on the front in incriminating red letters. OVERDUE.
Ryan frowned, stopping in the narrow hallway to peer at it more closely. There was nothing unusual about it, exactly. He was used to bills piling up. His family had never had a lot of money—or even enough money, probably, though it wasn’t like he’d ever gone hungry or anything like that. But the cable had been cut off a few times when he was a kid, plus the electricity once; he could remember his mom making a game out of it, setting up a blanket fort in the living room, telling stories with a flashlight and making popcorn on the stove. He was used to the odd call from a collection agency on the landline, and the way they periodically ate scrambled eggs for dinner a few nights in a row without ever mentioning why. Still, something about this one seemed particularly nasty.
“Give me that,” his mom said, coming up the basement stairs and plucking the envelope out of his hand, wedging it in between a cluster of others like it on the narrow strip of counter between the refrigerator and the stove. “It’s a federal offense to read other people’s mail, they teach you that at school?”
Ryan smiled faintly. “Right between cosines and the Franco-Prussian War,” he assured her, though he couldn’t quite get the joke to land. “Are we okay???
“Of course we’re okay,” his mom said, not quite looking at him as she flitted around the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down again, using the sprayer to rinse the already-clean sink. “I mean, it would be nice if your dad could be bothered to send a check every once in a while, but—” She shook her head. “I’m sorry, lovey. Business has been slow the last couple of months, that’s all. There’s that new grooming place in Colson Village, and—” She broke off again and blew a breath out, a trilling xylophone kind of sound. “I don’t want you to be worrying about that stuff,” she said. “You deserve to be a kid.”
“I know,” Ryan said uneasily, scanning his memory of the last few weeks for signs that things were more dire than usual—the way his mom kept turning the heat down, maybe, or the suspiciously empty fridge. “But we’re a team, right? You can tell me.”
“Of course we’re a team, sweetheart. And I love you for saying that.” His mom dropped the dish towel she was holding and took his face in her two hands, smiling up at him like he’d hung the damn moon. “But all you need to do is go to school and go to practice and have fun with your friends, all right? Let me be the mother.”
“I know,” Ryan said again. “But long-term, and stuff—”
“Long as you lock down that hockey scholarship, we’re golden.” His mom popped up on her toes, planted a smacking kiss on his cheek. “That’s your job, all right? I’ll take care of the rest.”
That caught Ryan by surprise a little, though he wasn’t entirely sure why. After all, it wasn’t like he hadn’t known his mom was counting on him to get a scholarship to college. It wasn’t even like he hadn’t realized that was probably the only way he could go. But it was different to hear it out loud like that, the path toward the rest of his life narrowing so starkly in front of him. It made everything feel abruptly intense.